A New Low for Liawatha

It seems that Elizabeth Warren has had a DNA analysis to “prove” that she really is of Native American heritage. The Boston Globe is covering the results thoroughly for her. I don’t think the timing of all this, just three weeks before her reelection bid, has anything to do with it. Nope.

Previous to her 2012 election to the U.S. Senate, Warren finagled her position at Harvard Law School from an intensive affirmative action scheme to get more women on the faculty. According to the Daily Caller, however, Harvard wasn’t too concerned about possible incompetence. In other words, Warren may have benefited primarily from the affirmative action scheme rather than qualifications. The Daily Caller:

In 1991, Rutgers Professor Phillip Schuchman reviewed Warren’s co-authored 1989 book “As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America” in the pages of the Rutgers Law Review, a publication Warren once edited. Schuchman found “serious errors” which result in “grossly mistaken functions and comparisons.”

Warren and her co-authors had drawn improper conclusions from “even their flawed findings,” and “made their raw data unavailable” to check, he wrote. “In my opinion, the authors have engaged in repeated instances of scientific misconduct.”

The work “contains so much exaggeration, so many questionable ploys, and so many incorrect statements that it would be well to check the accuracy of their raw data, as old as it is,” Schuchman added.

Harvard Law School appears to have overlooked that review, in part, because of its commitment to hiring a woman professor…

“We’re clearly trying to add more women to the faculty,” Clark told the Harvard Law Record in March 1994.

“Clark said HLS was engaging ‘affirmative action’ to the extent it was working to increase the number of women considered and interviewed,” wrote the Record’s Greg Stohr. “He also said the Law School would be willing to hire a qualified woman, even if her area of expertise did not fit an immediate need, but he stopped short of saying the school would lower its qualification requirements for women.”

Now, since when do universities lower their qualification requirements or academic standards? That never happens.

And since when do ambitious politicians lie to advance their careers, or to attain higher positions of power? Did Elizabeth Warren just make it up that she’s of Native American heritage just as an excuse to check the “Minority” box on application forms, such as for admittance to the Harvard Law School faculty? Did she really have to do that, given that she knew she could already more easily be hired based on just her female status?

… David Bernstein discovered that in annual reports by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) from 1986-1994, Warren was listed as a minority faculty member. Since AALS bases such information solely on what faculty self-reports, the information must have come from Warren herself. The AALS directories, however, only identify whether the faculty member is “minority,” not what minority status is claimed.

There seems to be some uncertainty in news reports as to whether Warren filled out the AALS forms, and if so, whether she identified as Native American, with the (Scott) Brown campaign demanding that she “come clean.”

I spoke this afternoon with Alethea Harney, Warren’s campaign press secretary, and confirmed several key details.

Harney acknowledged that the minority status reported by Warren to AALS was Native American, and that while Warren does not remember the precise forms, she believes there was a box or other designation to be selected for Native American.

The AALS reporting was the only time Warren self-identified as Native American as far as Warren currently is aware, according to Harney, and Warren never has joined any Native American groups, or asserted any tribal memberships.

… Warren was listed in the (Harvard) Women’s Law Journal on the list of “Women of Color in Legal Academia.” Where would the student editors have come up with the idea that Warren was a “woman of color”? Certainly not from looking at her.

The Journal used the 1991-1992 AALS directory list of Minority Law Teachers — on which Warren’s name appeared as we now know based on her claiming Native American status — as a starting point, then gathered other information from other sources, and then sent out confirmation letters.

That Legal Insurrection article also quotes from a Boston Globearticle thus:

“But for at least six straight years during Warren’s tenure, Harvard University reported in federally mandated diversity statistics that it had a Native American woman in its senior ranks at the law school. According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics are almost always based on the way employees describe themselves.

“In addition, both Harvard’s guidelines and federal regulations for the statistics lay out a specific definition of Native American that Warren does not meet.”

If Warren were serious about protecting consumer rights, she would have pressed for indicting Obama on fraud charges, given that he and his administration flunkies knowingly and repeatedly lied that people would keep their doctors or their current health care plan under ObamaCare.